The Great God Hoax

“According to Gallup surveys, 82 percent believe God is
revealed through the inspired words of the Bible and 84 percent believe
that Jesus Christ is ‘God or the Son of God.’”

— from God through American eyes by Robert Wuthnow

Religion is a hoax with a history at once ornate, wacky, beautiful and
terrible. So much has been built on a foundation of fantastic speculation,
and so many people have been employed in doing the work of mysterious
imaginary friends. Such an amazing con game — as one Zen master
laughed on his death-bed: “All this time I’ve been selling
water by the river!”

Also worthy of mention is
W.D. Fard’s
Nation of Islam:
Loopy
as they come, this was the religion (and the downfall) of Malcolm X. But
boy will I be sorry I laughed when
The Mother Plane
comes and proves me wrong.

A more recent pretender to the throne was memetic engineer L. Ron Hubbard,
the creator of the
baroque
belief system and behemoth known as
Scientology.
It’s as if Star Trek and
Erhard Seminar Training
had an unwanted lovechild.

But these are just three especially colorful examples of what is really a
highly successful pocket of human oddity. The vast majority of Americans,
for instance,
believe
in (and occasionally talk to) a curiously anthropomorphic embodiment of
good who is omniscient, omnipotent and responsible for every detail of
reality. And then the ignorant bullies make fun of children for believing
in Santa Claus.

The end-times have been
prematurely announced
by Christian cults ever since Paul was playing good shepherd to his
scattered and easily-misled Mediterranean sheep. Every year now
there’s new
incontrovertable proof
that the apocalypse is imminent. (Speaking of
interesting reports:
Pilate’s official
report
on the crucifixion of Jesus was published to rave reviews in 1879.)

Joanna Southcott,
“the second Eve,” picked 1814 (actually “the fourth year
after the first decade of the century” so her remaining followers are
banking on 2014), which was okay for her, I guess, since that’s when
she died. She claimed to be carrying a child of divine ancestry, but
whatever it was wasn’t a child and ended up offing her. Not before
10,000 people purchased sealed certificates that represented their booking
on Kingdom of God airlines.

Cyril Henry Hoskins wrote a dozen books under the name
Lobsang Rampa
in which he claimed to be a Tibetan Buddhist master with a surgically-opened
“third eye.” Did very well for himself before his story fell
apart.

Why not see just how far you can push the envelope: take a cue from the
Discordians
or the
Church of theSubgenius
and make a new religion even more preposterous, and even more True, than the
last. Or just take a riff from an already-existing religion and run with it.

Here’s a good one: There’s a woman by the name of
Vassula Ryden
who claims to receive what she calls “original handwriting”
messages channeled from Jesus, his mom and Dad, and an angel named Daniel.
She started engaging in divinely-inspired automatic writing when filling
out a shopping list in 1985, and has been on the lecture circuit as
God’s personal dictation secretary ever since. The Pope considers
her brand of
nonsense a
heretical distraction
from his own, but she’s got true believers even among the Catholic
clergy.

Buffo reports: “In 1983 students at a
Danish High School in Arhus invented a new religion.
The students, involved in a youth culture study project, called their new
faith Apialketisme and invented slogans such as
‘Apialketisme against egotism’ and
‘Use your taupei [a fictitious part of the
brain] and become happy.’ They invented a founder, a ceremony [like
Transcendental Meditation] and a computer test [copied from Scientology] and
handed out leaflets in the street, Moonie-style. To their surprise and
shock people did not see the practical joke, instead took it seriously and
felt misused and betrayed when they heard that
Apialketisme was a farce.”

AimeeSempleMcPherson
(“Sister Aimee”) founded an evangelical
empire in the U.S. in the 1920s,
then faked her own drowning (and covered up for turning up alive by turning
it into a faked kidnapping) in order to run off with her lover.

Lord knows that some of the creative religious hysteriæ have been
painful in the extreme, both to participants and to innocent bystanders.
After all, there’s no human torture that can compare with eternal
hellfire, so the ends clearly justify the means. Perhaps you’ve
heard of the
Salem Witch Trials,
or their more recent counterpart: the hunt for
satanic ritual child abuse.

A source of inspiration to me has been the life and work of
Brother Jed, a wandering campus
preacher in the U.S. who has adopted the
technique of donning the caricature of the ignorant and intolerant Bible
Belt fire-and-brimstone preacher (“Slatterns! Trollops! Women should
be obedient baby machines!”) in order to attract crowds of college
students eager to be seen in public rebelling against such a father figure
— making an appearance in the quad by Brother Jed one of the
best-attended lectures at college.

More up-in-your-face was the bold stunt performed by Michel Mourre, an
ex-catholic who, in 1950, with the coöperation of a band of Lettrists,
caught, gagged, stripped and bound a priest before the Easter High Mass at
Notre Dame Cathedral, put on his vestments, and stepped to the pulpit to
declare to the congregation, “Brothers, God is
dead” and to outline what this was going to mean for the poor,
misguided souls. According to one account, “[s]everal
minutes passed before the congregation actually registered what was
happening. He managed to escape out of the back of the cathedral but the
congregation caught up with him on the quai where they proceeded to try to
lynch him. The Lettrist, alas, was forced to surrender to the police in
order to save his neck.”

If you’re interested in checking out the weird archæology used
to prop up beloved primitive myths that have been taken too literally,
don’t miss our
Archæological Forgeries
section, where you’ll learn the
truth about fossils,
all about the discovery of Noah’s Ark (as reported on
CBS), and the
science of
creationism.

Credentials for your favorite religious title, from Minister or Imam all
the way up to Pope, Saint, or Messiah are available from the
Universal Life Church,
which thinks the world would be a lot nicer if we all could become the
Reverend So-and-so. I can’t help but agree — I became a
minister back in 1994 and I’ve never felt better — look into it.

What do you make of
Léo Taxil?
Went from being a
prominent
free-thinker and anti-Papist in the 19th Century to being an
equally prominent anti-masonic Catholic before
announcing
before a shocked crowd that he’d been taking the Church for a ride.

Which reminds me of the
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
— an exposé of what really happens in a Catholic
convent, as told by an escaped nun. Scandalous and very, very dirty. And
of course, the work of someone with a good imagination and an anti-Catholic
axe to grind.

I’ll finish off with the legend of
Prester John, whose
mythical kingdom
gave hope to Europe’s Catholics in the early centuries of the last
millennium.